


White Ink

by montparnasse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Post-Prisoner of Azkaban, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 00:51:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16465556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: Autumn 1994. A house on a hill and two assholes in love ripping each other limb from limb.





	White Ink

**Author's Note:**

> inspired equally by an anon who asked me about r/s a while back and by deerhunter's "[heatherwood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QniVaRwOx8Y)," which is about going back to the house you grew up in to die. the title is from "[white ink](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSZiEiVChHM)," from the same album... i don't remember what it's about, but to me it's always sounded like realizing you're alive after all.

The house was like a memory in sepia kept inside a locket, everything preserved in sickly amber unlight so that even the shadows on the walls hung the way they had when Remus had left ten years ago. He and Sirius had barely even moved in before the apocalypse was visited upon him a scant two months later; in retrospect it was a fucking stupid thing to do, not just at that dismal juncture in ‘81 but at any point in their relationship, which had always cycled from quasi-romance to acrimonious breakup and back again and again and again like some kind of perpetual Catherine wheel. It was royally never what Remus had wanted it to be. He knew it was never what Sirius had wanted it to be, either—he suspected that _he_ was never what Sirius had wanted and never could have been—but nevertheless they’d tried, as if they couldn’t do anything else. Wasn’t like they ever had anything to show for it, but for a long time Remus had taken it as proof positive that fate was a powerful force which existed solely to fuck him sideways every time the opportunity presented itself, which was often.

They’d always sent their rent checks to an old man in Cumbria they’d never met who was supposedly their landlord; this hadn’t changed, though Remus had always assumed it was a flimsy cover for Dumbledore to push them into place with one of his many unseen hands while maintaining a clinical distance, like a scientist from drugged monkeys. For a while he left his things by the door and walked around, taking inventory the way he sometimes did after the full moon, counting the spaces between heartbeats, his fingers and his teeth smearing blood under his tongue, the bellows of his rib-rungs: sagging fold-out couch, yellow paint peeling in ribbons in the kitchen, dirty fireplace the previous tenants had apparently never seen fit to clean, Muggle radio on the bookshelf, toothpaste-flecked mirror in the bathroom, a narrow twin bed in the matchbox-sized bedroom that could scarcely fit him. The front door still wouldn’t shut or lock unless you leaned your whole weight on it just so, the wood grown thick with humidity. Until he caught sight of himself in the glass of the cupboard above the stove he wondered if maybe he’d Apparated himself into another dimension and/or was still tripping on the peyote he’d had the day before in a truly inadvisable attempt at self-medication. He looked like something flung out of time, incongruous, like the suspicious piece hidden in those kids’ picture books. Like something that didn’t quite belong.

It was 1994, late September. He was thirty-four years old. He was back in the house he’d expected to die in thirteen years ago, waiting for the man he’d expected to kill him to come walking like a wraith back down the long road from the deep piney woods to the north. But he’d been expecting that last thing one way or another since he was at least fifteen.

After a while he sat down at the end of the bed with the weight of it tugging at his ankles and his shoulders until it got dark and he was obliged to go unpack only to find that half the lightbulbs in the house had fried in the interim. Towards dawn, unslept and feverish, he woke up freezing on the couch, listening to the loose shingles on the roof chattering like teeth in the gathering wind and twisting in on himself against a draft from the far window, feeling as though something was in the room with him. He sat there until the sun skimmed over the hazy blue film of the horizon, remembering, waiting.

—

Dumbledore’s letter said to expect Sirius by midnight of the twenty-first. He still hadn’t shown up on the twenty-fifth, and Remus’s knees were aching like a dirge with the last dregs of the moon still sawing along tendon and bone. There’d been no explanatory letter but Remus would’ve been a fool to expect one; he’d get there when he got there and not a minute before he wanted to be, probably bitching about the cold and the filthy house and dripping rainwater all over the floor. In his head he’d rehearsed it a thousand times and he still didn’t know what he was going to say.

There wasn’t a television or a working phone in the house and he spent most of his time listening to the radio while he cleaned the worst of the disaster areas, occasionally hearing things through the static that made him look over his shoulder only to find nothing there, the sound and the presence blurring into the shadows of the smoke-stained curtains and corners as soon as he turned his head. After a couple of days he started sleeping on the couch because he woke up every night in the narrow bed with his back aching, feeling like something was watching him, remembering that they’d never gotten anything bigger because Remus had started sleeping on the couch then, too. Perhaps they’d fucked a whole three times in this place; he couldn’t really remember. Wasn’t long before they stopped talking altogether.

Back then he’d sat up nights waiting for Sirius to come home from the Ministry, where he was working nights patrolling the Tube and other highly trafficked areas of the city, but more and more Sirius didn’t come home at all; when he did he smelled like James’s cigarettes and whatever baby powder Lily used on Harry and he usually orchestrated the whole thing so that Remus was just about to leave for whatever shitty job he was working at the time right when he showed up. Chewed up with insomnia and fear and the horrible screaming sucking yearning peeling him open at the heart and gut and digging sweat-salty fingers into every unhealing wound he took to leaving notes for Sirius to find on the coffee table or by the stove or in his coat pockets, which likely he’d never read, or if he had he’d probably gone directly to James’s to pretend for a while. He’d always suspected that greatest tragedy of Sirius’s entire fucking life was that James Potter had the audacity to fall in love with someone who wasn’t him. Even when they’d started hooking up in seventh year Remus had understood he was a piss-poor replacement for what Sirius really wanted, and as such they could never do anything but hurt and disappoint each other; for a long time Remus was jealous, until he realized sometime in ‘81 that this didn’t matter either. When the end finally came it was undifficult to accept what had been staring him in the face and sharing his clothes and eating his food and smoking his cigarettes and fucking him and forgetting him and unloving him since 1977.

He was sitting in lukewarm water in the bathtub making an nth attempt at a cleaning spell to make the ring of soap scum at least mildly less noticeable when something in the house seemed to shift, like an old dog sitting back on its haunches. Thrumming in his ears and his mouth as he stood up was a song he’d heard before, something old, something with no name, a jittery unrhythm he could never replicate on any instrument or with any words. Footsteps, just outside the bathroom door.

—

“Nice weather,” Sirius said, three or four days into the first of the autumn rains. It was about nine in the morning and it was foggy, rolling in on the heels of an early October frost. “Makes you want a cup of tea.”

Pretty quickly they’d settled into a routine, which consisted mostly of avoiding eye contact, not touching each other, and saying maybe five things apiece per day that always sounded like something you might find on a supermarket greeting card until they both went to bed. Remus was already dead tired of it but there were only so many times he could pretend to have forgotten something at the store and then spend all afternoon tracking it down in the driving rain while Sirius wrote letters to Harry and burnt food on the stove at home. Coming from someone who’d once been inside him the charade was unbearable; just looking at Sirius set something burning in his gut that kept him awake staring at the black holes of spreading mold dotting the ceiling above the couch where it had leaked over the years, thinking about the uncrossable gulf of years, feeling his heart and his stomach climbing into his mouth even in the unreal blur of dreams. Sometimes he could hear Sirius pacing around the familiar desire path worn into the carpet of the bedroom, but neither of them said anything about it.

“I can make some,” said Remus, “I mean, I’ve only got bags. But I assume you don’t mind.”

“Not sure I can tell the difference anymore.” From where he was sitting at the very opposite end of the couch he felt Sirius glance over at him, and then the subsequent drop of his stomach down to his ankles. “I thought—it’s just. You’re different.”

“It’s been, what, thirteen years now?”

“I mean it’s like the more I think about it the more I don’t know if we ever really,” he trailed off. 

“It’s not like we were getting along before that.”

“That’s—holy fuck, Remus, I was just asking how you’ve been for the last like, thirteen years. How am I still better at human conversation than you.”

What the fuck do you think it was like, Remus thought. It had taken him twelve years to feel like he could even pretend to be a human being again and then here Sirius came pulling the plug right out of him. Looking over at him Remus could see that he’d been picking the destroyed skin around his fucked nails again, bitten bloody far past the quick. “For a while I stayed here. Dumbledore was fucking, you know how it is, you couldn’t avoid him of course, but I tried. I worked lousy jobs in Muggle places and did a lot of acid mostly. Then I left and worked more lousy jobs. Hated everyone and everything and myself. Didn’t come back until last year, you know the rest.”

“Leave it to you to make it sound fucking boring,” said Sirius. Through the veil of his hair the very tip of his nose alone was visible. “I thought maybe you’d leave again, right after. Or maybe you got married or something.”

“Why the hell would I do that?”

“Money? A regular fuck? Don’t know really, I just wondered. My cousin likes you.”

“Your cousin barely knows me,” said Remus, though he couldn’t pretend at this point not to have noticed. Several times over the years he’d tried pathetically to comfort himself with bullshit sadsack platitudes he’d cooked up while high and/or near-catatonically depressed, e.g. that if he’d felt this for Sirius once then logically he could feel it for someone else again. But it had never happened. “What about you.”

“What about me?”

“What did you do, I mean?”

“Dreamed. Don’t remember most of it now. Stuck my face out in the fog and the wind. Hated everyone and everything and myself. Turned into the dog, pulled all my hair out and then it grew back and I did it again.” Outside the needle-cold wind had taken the clothes and sheets Remus had hung earlier with a few _Impervius_ charms during the break in the rain, casting soft and mobile morning-shadows through the grey light of the windows. Very briefly Sirius dared to meet his eyes; he looked, Remus thought, like a lost bird, scared and starving in unfamiliar migratory lands. “I’ve, Remus. I’ve missed you. For a long time.”

Like pure spinal déjà vu hammering a jolt into his nauseous heartbeat he could remember so many times sitting in this same spot or in their flat in London, wishing terribly and with miserable might that Sirius could just say anything that might give him a single clue—that for once in his life he could act like he gave a fuck before the damage was done. Thirteen years ago he'd've done anything just for Sirius say that and actually believe him but so help him he couldn’t stand the sound of it now. Memory drowning and knees cracking he stood up, listening to the hoarseness of the house settling in the throttling wind when he grabbed his coat from the hook by the front door.

“I’ve got a few things to get done in town. Probably ought to get something for dinner too,” he said. “I’ll get you some good tea while I’m out.” If Sirius said anything else he didn’t hear it over the unspooling seismic static of Apparition and the sudden faraway hush of the sea unscrolling all around him, lullaby-blue, miles and miles away.

—

More and more, when he thought about it, it was a miracle they’d managed for as often and as long as they had. Truth be told Remus didn’t understand him; Sirius came from money, from a summer home in the Pennines, from yearly physicals as a kid and birthday parties and shoes that fit and he behaved as though everyone else did too. They couldn’t really even keep the same time, jerking and cutting themselves on each other like glass kites struggling in a weak peal of wind: he’d spent years wanting more of Sirius than he’d ever have, wanting just to be enough, and Sirius had spent an equivalent amount of time wanting Remus to be someone else. Fundamentally it was fucked. Every time Remus left he swore it’d be the last but then they’d run into each other at an Order meeting, or fresh from an invigorating brush with a comically violent death on a job, or at a party or a sleazy bar, their scene so incestuous it was nearly impossible to live in the same city and avoid each other, and then everything would devolve again, and he’d convince himself for a whole week of marathon fucking and enormous breakfasts that this time would be different. A few months later, when he walked out the door in the middle of the night and Sirius as ever did nothing to stop him, he’d swear the same bullshit all over again like a jilted prairie wife in a cheap western. On and on and on and on until the end when Sirius, not to be outdone, made the choice suddenly very final.

Love when he was younger had always seemed like proof of something, that it meant there was something good at his core, something worth knowing—that he was someone who deserved anything good or that another living, breathing body might want to share something good with him. Having not had enough of it as a child he figured in moments of half-assed psychoanalysis that it had given him some kind of complex that made him go looking for it in the worst possible places, but sometime near the end of things—summer of ‘81, he thought he remembered, right after they moved in—he’d realized with some surprise that he’d never regretted it. Whether it was because he seemed incapable of falling out of love with Sirius or something more sinister, he could never decide; it felt too pretty and was probably untrue to think it was something inescapable or innate, that it went soul-deep, a part of him like his grey hairs or his lycanthropy or the birthmark on his wrist or putting cream in his coffee every morning, but in certain aspects it was. It was incomplete and often unreciprocal and nothing about it came easy, but he loved Sirius Black, for better and for worse, in absence, in silence, in complete and utter selfishness. Loved him to his back teeth, gluttonous and imperishable. It wasn’t exactly a good feeling.

The morning after the full moon Remus woke up again around midafternoon, the curtains closed against the migraine driving a jagged icepick-bolt behind his eye and spreading tendrils into the entire right side of his head, Sirius sitting curled up on the far end of the couch at his feet like a kicked dog. Hours ago he’d said he was going to make tea. Careful not to wake him Remus got up and put the kettle on the stove; in the burnt October light catching on the cupboard glass and the cracks in the curtains they both looked almost young.

—

Nights when neither of them could sleep they started sitting up together, talking or just listening to the house pulsing in the dark with the accumulated weight of time. What a trip to have only lived here together for a few months and to still have every single corner cobwebbed with some fragment of themselves like a spiderwebbed gunshot-burst left behind long ago. The place seemed sometimes to be made of memory, scattered thick as dust and blood; it was why he’d left in the first place. Everything had hurt, every vein of sunlight, every loose floorboard, all of it leaden with loss and shame, the arthritic creak of the foundation at night gnawing along his skull like a dog on the trail of something good and hurting. It was like living inside a Pensieve. In the middle of the night, February or March and freezing cold, he’d taken only what he could carry and overdrew his checking account on a bottle of Talisker and a plane ticket to New York.

“For a long time I thought I’d die here,” Remus told him. He’d made lavender tea, for all the good it did either of them; Sirius was writing a letter to Harry in the soft sepia of the lamplight, which he did nearly nightly. He couldn’t remember the last letter he’d had from Sirius himself. “But then it was like, it’d been a year, and then nearly another, and I still hadn’t.”

“You were always better at surviving than you gave yourself credit for... honestly if the apocalypse comes I'd bet on you. It is, you know, kind of sexy.”

“Not for lack of trying otherwise,” he said, “but I never thought I’d come back, either. That feeling—it’s like it never left. All I had to do was walk in the door and I felt like an old animal laying down to die.”

“Didn’t you say something like that once. We’d been fighting, if I remember.”

It had been in London on a sleepless and wiltingly hot night in June or July, around the third or fourth breakup. Dying weather, he’d been thinking, not unlike here and now. Divorce weather, suicide weather. Sirius had been taking _seeing other people_ to far more prodigious lengths than Remus, who hadn’t taken well to walking in on him and Dearborn when his shift ended early, not least because Dearborn, not sensing the murderous tension in the room or maybe just trying to start shit, had suggested Remus either bend over and make himself useful or go jerk off in the corner out of the way. Sifting through the rubble afterwards only made it worse: Remus still didn’t sleep with anyone else and Sirius didn’t come home for a week.

“Who knows,” said Remus.

“For what it’s worth I’m glad it worked out this way,” said Sirius, not looking up from his letter this time. “Seeing you again, I mean.”

“Let’s just ignore that you’re a fugitive and it’s only a matter of time before everything goes straight to shit again.”

“That’s—isn’t it supposed to make you appreciate what you have, when everything’s going to shit.” With his hair pulled back in the quiet butter light Sirius looked like the nighttime skyline of some apocalyptic city, his profile like something bitten out of the black from far, far away. “Anyway I need to get going again. Probably in the next week or so.”

Remus looked over at him, a kind of unshocked and sinking wonder kicking at the back of his head. Again Sirius didn’t meet his eyes. Oil-slick of anger seeping to the surface, the way it always had before. “Harry?”

 _James’s son_ would’ve been more accurate. In a few of the empty picture frames on the mantel he could see their reflections through the dark granulation of the room, one cutting a look that was too daring and too unashamedly reckless for a man his age; the other, by contrast, simply looked too old.

“Yeah,” said Sirius, “I need to be there. I did promise, you know.”

“Suppose you did.”

“The old man doesn’t know, or at least I don’t know if he knows, so if anyone asks let’s just keep it that way for now.” He put his pen down. Stared at his fingernails for a beat or two. “I’ll write you once I get up there.”

“How the hell do you think you’re gonna write me while you’re living in, who the fuck knows, a cave or a hovel or whatever and there’ll be people around. And if you’re expecting Harry to be your personal fucking delivery service when you get there you’d better forget about it and actually _think_ about what you’re asking the kid to do, because this is—”

“Why the fuck are you saying—”

“Because you’ve always been very fucking bad at understanding that other people have, like, feelings,” said Remus. “Yours are the only ones that matter. You used to say I was like that and I probably am but at least I’m not asking a fourteen-year-old boy who’s actively being hunted by god knows what to cover up for me and deliver my mail. Don’t write me, you fuck.”

Sirius was watching him now with something halfway between cold contempt and dead surprise; to his credit he didn’t once look away. “Been waiting a while for that one, haven’t you.”

“Would you just—”

“You didn’t exactly try very hard either.”

“Jesus Christ, can’t this wait.”

“No, asshole. Finish what you started.” He’d turned to face Remus fully, goading, and Remus felt it all flush out of him at the sight of it like the last surge of venom coursing from a snakebite wound. “You’ve never even had the guts to follow through with anything you do. I could never fucking stand that about you, it's always, it’ll never change. You'll fucking well never change.”

Save the full-moon mornings washing battery acid through his tendons and his knees he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so tired. Fifth year, maybe, post-Event. Or 1978, post-screaming fight. Or early 1979, post-first breakup. Or 1981, post-apocalypse. Shattering, over and over, like a glacier splitting in warm waters or a puzzle that never went back together the way it was supposed to. Or perhaps it was never supposed to be at all. This had always been easier and far less humiliating than admitting to himself that for years he’d seen meaning where there was none and thinking idiotically that he could ever get blood from the metaphorical stone. Like any other soul-warping sickness Sirius was in his blood, in the very atomic filament of his heart and lungs, in his speech and his step, in his mind where certain thoughts re-routed and became something else. Dearly too fucking late to scrub it out now.

“Do what you want, Sirius,” he said, pressing his cup of tea to his temple, “god knows you will anyway. It’s never made any difference to you whether I’m around or not.”

Confusion dawning on his face alongside furious and rinsing derision, his mouth parted just slightly, red as blood spilled. “Remus. You can’t honestly think that. It’s just—fuck you. You can’t.”

There was an old Leonard Cohen song threading through his head, just a few lines he’d always snagged on through the years. They were close enough that one of them could’ve reached out, Remus supposed, traced the lines creased in a palm or the branching blue skip of veins in a wrist, pressed into the warm crook of an elbow. Neither of them did. Neither of them even tried.

“You really don’t get it,” said Remus, softly, following the crooked black line of a tattoo up Sirius’s arm until it disappeared under his sleeve, “you never will.” Against the single-paned window the midnight rain made a quiet kissing sound like a wild animal clawing at a vivid sliver of light, trying to get back in to where it was warm.

—

A few days into another bout of nonstop autumn rain unpeeling from the ten-ton shroud of clouds and rolling fog the roof finally gave out, right where the ceiling had molded into Pointillist dots directly above Remus’s head on the couch; together they patched it as best as they could and attempted a few spells to dry the rug and the couch and then themselves, none of which worked. In the middle of one of these Remus took hold of Sirius’s shirt, wishing warmth into his fingers and trying the magic only with his hand, and Sirius goddamn him leaned forward and kissed him. Both of them dripping wet, his mouth softer than chalk or new grass, quick as a head-on collision. A completely hysterical foregone conclusion. Later he said he’d been thinking about it for days; Remus didn’t believe him but he did slip a rain-clammy hand underneath Sirius’s untucked shirt in the burgeoning dark, and that was that.

Lying in the bed they didn’t fit on he let himself wonder late at night while Sirius was asleep or pretending to be what it might be like, this time. Mostly he found he could no longer envision anything at all. Before, even at his most seethingly furious and/or pathetically wishful, he could scarcely find words or images that fit what he thought he wanted; it existed in his head as a sort of untranslatable and untraversable blank like a migraine aura or a missing tooth. We could be _____. I want _____. We could have _____ or _____ but I still _____ _____. He thought of a picture he’d torn up sometime around 1980, his favorite picture of Sirius, taken of course by James. He’d been in it too, but he’d turned his head at an odd angle at the last second, so he was always just out of focus.

Every morning the sunlight spread in unbelievable blessing through the moth-eaten curtains across the bed and the floor to the far wall, Sirius’s breath at the back of his neck and an arm thrown around his waist in this place where everything had ended. They’d begun to find old things, forgotten things, relics Remus had left behind when he’d cut and run so long ago, choked with dust and dirt and streaked with cobwebs, mildewed: a ring of Sirius’s he’d stolen from his family, Remus’s Modern Lovers cassette with the tape half disintegrated, a key to the motorbike, a pack of menthols, an illegible, waterlogged note in Remus’s handwriting, thirteen years old. He never knew what it meant. Something beyond memory, maybe, something unfinished, unquenchable. Otherwise perhaps a warning. When he found these things Remus usually threw them in the kitchen trash or put them in the fire at night but sometimes they came back days later; this, they didn’t talk about.

“Your heart’s going—Christ,” said Sirius, slurry with sleep, though he wasn’t touching Remus. “Bad dreams?”

“I’m fine.”

“Sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said.

He could feel that Sirius was going to touch him before it happened. In his mind the touch was blue, pale blue eveningness full of shadow, full of waiting, full of blind exhausted idiot hope. When he finally did the entire predatory wingspan of his cold hand spread out across Remus’s chest where his heart ran red and quick, feeling it pick up again like a church bell being tugged on a rope when Sirius pressed closer in the shifting muted gold of morning. His nose brushed against the buttons of Remus’s spine up to the curl of grey hairs at the back of his head, and then his mouth, unzipping along the slope of Remus’s shoulder, molten and searching in the crook of his neck. Lower and lower his hand slipped along the basin of his ribs and belly until his thumb brushed against Remus’s navel, making him shiver; he could feel it echo through Sirius, all the way down to his toes. For a long time neither of them moved. Sirius pressed his forehead to the back of Remus’s neck, eyelashes ghosting against the thin skin as Remus closed his eyes and breathed with him, feeling part of the same miraculous unwhole, the same off-kilter, inextinguishable eternity. Just thinking it felt fucking ridiculous, but there it was.

Look at me, Remus was thinking. How can you not see what you do to me. How can you not know. At some point when he wasn’t paying attention this had subsumed even the other, older possession, dwelling down deep in his ganglion brain-shards, dividing at the core of every cell. Cut him open and you’d find it, ineffable as magic, inseparable from him as his very soul, glowing in the fucking dark. There was no living without it; he hardly knew himself without it as he hardly knew himself without the wolf. He could never be otherwise. Worst perhaps of all he suspected Sirius knew all of this.

“Stop it. You’ll give yourself an aneurysm or something,” said Sirius. His hand had strayed to the pulsebeat-murmur whispering fast in Remus’s hip, circling, trying to smooth it out of him like wrinkled clothes. “You’ve always been like that, you’re so—you can never just enjoy anything.”

“Usually when I start enjoying something is around the time it all gets fucked up.”

“Shouldn’t you appreciate it more then. Like, especially right now—we’ve talked about this.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that that isn’t enough, sometimes.”

“You’re the most miserable fuck I know,” said Sirius. Against the back of Remus’s neck he felt his smile pull tight.

“Maybe we just bring it out of each other,” said Remus, “which, you know, seems likely. Misery loves company and we’re both like, barbers or plague doctors with leeches or something bleeding it out of each other. Never stops.”

He shifted his legs up, already too close to the edge of the bed, but Sirius moved with him, mirroring, lying there beside him with Remus’s hair in his mouth and his breath that was too big for the bed. “I always liked your horrorshow metaphors. But I think we bring other things out of each other too.”

“You’ve made me insane,” Remus offered.

“You did that on your own,” said Sirius. Heart beating against Remus’s back, forehead pressed against the nape of his neck like a penitent. “Can’t you just—for once, Remus, would it kill you to try.”

Would it kill him to try. Would it kill him to try! The sound of it rattled around his head with the ache and weight of history, having said it himself in what was practically another life. But. But—but. Because he didn’t have an answer and because everything outside the bed and their bodies seemed cold as the grave he turned to Sirius, nearly falling off the edge in the process, trailing his fingers into the divot of Sirius’s collarbone where the night before he’d left a blood-dark bruise with teeth. Kissing, eyes half open, rough thistle of his stubble against Remus’s lips and jaw. After a minute Sirius caught Remus’s hand up in his, threading their fingers together in all the places where no words would fit. Twinned with the desperate and bulldozing imperative to hold on to his grip for as long as he could was, as it had always been, the urge to let go.

“I miss you,” said Sirius, barely any sound in it but breath, “I mean it. I always have.”

Liar, Remus thought, what you miss is James. What you miss is your wasted life and your freedom and never having to blame yourself. What you miss is mostly what you never had. But as far as that went Remus supposed they weren’t so very different after all.

“I miss you too,” he said, and pulled the duvet closer around their shoulders. This close the only thing he could see was Sirius.

Life had always been easier before he knew the taste of Sirius’s mouth or the nighttime pitch of his heartbeat or the precise measure of physical distance between them, but he’d done it anyway. Long ago time had caught him by the ankle in the same groove; there was no getting out of it now, he realized, and in the overwhelmed spread of light lancing through the curtains he pressed closer and kissed Sirius again, and then again, like he didn’t know how to do anything else. 

—

A few days later Sirius left in the middle of the night without saying goodbye. On the coffee table Remus found a shred of paper with a couple of clipped-sounding sentences saying Sirius hadn’t wanted to wake him and he’d write when he got up north and not much else. So Remus got to work on everything Dumbledore asked of him and cleaned the house and cooked too much food and settled in to wait yet again for the return of the once and future whatever.

In the coming winter the frost hung in brittle spidery nets across the dead grass every morning, tracking ghostly runes across the windows where Remus looked out as the sun rose, watching for something through the trees and the nervous sinews of the road without even knowing why. Once in a while he caught sight of his reflection on accident and thought he could see Sirius there, in the sunset windows or the bathroom mirror or the glass on the mantel, grey in his eyes, wild rat’s-nest hair, nose and jaw and brow cut from sheer granite out of his own face. It had happened a few times during those precious wounded months they’d spent here together, hating each other and the house, and then every day until Remus left, part of him fused irrevocably into Sirius, though of course he never had any idea if Sirius had ever felt the same way. Love had sometimes left him with a kind of amnesiac out-of-body experience: he wasn’t always sure who he was anymore.

The morning after the November moon he woke up on the kitchen floor with blood in his mouth and a fever-bright rime of light in his eyes, his clothes all folded neatly on the couch, the sun through the stripped tree branches jangling along his nerves in sluggish chords of gold and green and his skin so raw it felt like he’d just been born. Through the draft in the room, through the wind and the walls and the yawning splintery gaps in the floorboards, he could sense the footsteps from far away as easily as a heartbeat drumming against his ear, coming quick down the long road to the north. Coming closer, coming back again.

No reason he couldn’t go out to meet him, Remus thought, knees and neck cracking when he struggled to his feet, the back door already open. After all it was only a short walk from the house to the winding piney woods, stumbling onto the road with his heart lit like a candle wick, sun-blind and alive.


End file.
